Ultimatums in war on terror come back to haunt White House

Kenneth J. Moynihan

Wednesday

May 30, 2007 at 12:47 AM

Remember victory in Iraq?

Vice President Dick Cheney last weekend was the main speaker at the commencement exercises of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He played the same role in 2003. It’s discouraging, if not surprising, to read the two speeches side-by-side.

Which do you think contained the following sentence? “Historians and military planners will study the battles in Iraq for years to come, but the basic reason for its success are known already.”

If you answered 2003, you were right. Try a couple more:

1. “Their ultimate goal is to establish a totalitarian empire, a caliphate, with Baghdad as its capital. They view the world as a battlefield and they yearn to hit us again.”

2. “Thanks to them, U.S. and coalition forces maintained the initiative at every stage in the conflict, controlled its pace, and so determined its outcome. With our victory in Iraq, we have removed a threat to our country and to our friends in the region.”

The first is from last Saturday. It continued the impression that a major responsibility of the vice president is to promote the belief that there is an appropriate enemy for the country to be fighting. He has been the most devoted preacher of the fiction that the U.S. attacked Saddam Hussein in retaliation for the Sept. 11 attacks. Without abandoning the evil Saddam, Mr. Cheney helped spread the notion that the war was necessary to counter the forces of international terrorism, which had to be confronted in Iraq before they reached the U.S. He says this despite the fact that there were no significant terrorist facilities or operations in Iraq until after the U.S. destroyed the Iraqi government.

Mr. Cheney is now the chief preacher of the idea that we are at war because the mutually murderous Muslim sects in Iraq and its region are going to team up and install a totalitarian empire that will function as a restored caliphate.

The second quotation is from 2003. It came immediately after the vice president attributed U.S. victory to “our secretary of defense, Don Rumsfeld, our outstanding theater commander, General Tommy Franks, and the men and women of our armed forces.” If only Rumsfeld, Franks and Cheney had understood what they had gotten us into.

In 2003 Mr. Cheney was articulating the Bush Doctrine, which asserts “that states supporting terrorists, or providing sanctuary for terrorists, will be deemed just as guilty of crimes as the terrorists themselves. If there is anyone in the world today who doubts the seriousness of the Bush Doctrine, I would urge that person to consider the fate of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.”

It was a heady time, back in the days of victory. Mr. Bush and his circle got to promulgate doctrines and to tell the world they’d better accept them. And it was all so righteous. “In the Middle East,” said Mr. Cheney in 2003, “where ideologies of hatred and murder have caused such great suffering, the United States will use our influence and idealism to bring a new era of freedom and prosperity.”

“We’re fighting a war on terror because the enemy attacked us first, and he hit us hard,” the vice president said Saturday. He again found no need to say who “he” was.

“America is fighting this enemy in Iraq because that is where they have gathered,” said Mr. Cheney. He might, but wouldn’t, consider the facts that they are gathered in Iraq because the United States started a war there and lost control of the situation.

What have Mr. Cheney and his associates learned in the last five years? Have they at least given up on a U.S. military victory and turned their sights on serious diplomatic negotiations? Mr. Cheney last weekend:

“We have to go after the terrorists, shut down their training camps, take down their networks, deny them sanctuary and bring them to justice.” Not much room for diplomacy there.

As he was closing last Saturday, the vice president assured the Army that it would “have all the equipment, supplies, manpower, training and support essential to victory. I give you this assurance on behalf of the president. You soldier for him, and he will soldier for you.”

Exactly what does that sentence mean? Are we to picture the president soldiering against the Congress and the troops soldiering for him?